Taken from the July 2012 issue of Dazed & Confused:

Black walls smear the sun behind them. No one was watching. His last eyes creamed in his face and let him breathe. Where the house ended was not where the world began precisely but the edge of somewhere else. The knife longer than his arms and torso combined dry with cream-colored substance as in the background of the photograph of him as a child before the moon was knocked from the sky to reveal a lidless eye that always had been and always was. On the floor the hair of the silenced cut from the heads in their sleep. He drags his body through long rooms each wider than he’d remembered them having been coming in, the house constantly changing each time he needs it not to, to remember where he had been before and go there to do such a thing as eat or wash the mess off of his skin or use a machine to contact someone to speak to among the never-ending silence that he had prayed for so long until it was the only thing. Photographs of the bodies before they had become tongueless line the hallways longer than any stretch of frame through which he’d previously passed. The hair has grown on his arms so much since last he’d looked. His eyes inside him burning where no one had been watching how he’d taken the arms off of the torso and the hands off of the arms and fingers off of the hands and the nails off of the fingers, and glued the nails to the windows over the nails before them to keep the light out and the eyes out. He did not want to see anything beyond the surface of the mirror burned over with smoke so thick there was no surface there, the house a counting prism for him to hold inside of and go on beyond the need of color of light or voice of bone. For some stretches the walls aren’t even black here any longer but they are gold, they search through his vision with a light that marks his sight out for lengths within which the house may be rearranged, a bed where there had never been a bed before, a door blocked by the dresser full of skins, a lamp enlarged to fill a room despite the fact it no longer will give light. He remembers beyond the house the snuffed-out circles where those like him before they disappeared had buried whoever they could find alive just to listen to the way their voice changed under the thick dirt growing thicker like the walls inside this house, the bodies all beneath him crammed in here with him with the silence of the world, a womb of ruins hidden from light surviving against whatever else could have come for anyone in the larger space where air knitted houses together until there was nothing but the house, all walls and leather and the oceans turning inside out and babies crawling through the mud for any inch of what a gown was to cover their nudity already knowing the nature of nudity and the nature of the knives he carries through the dark who cannot see. The blood is his and pours too from his earholes matching the long unending shriek of what the sky had become under fire from us all knowing soon it would wrap around us in the night and take the air out of our lungs and from the space where we had walked so long together coloring the air with language, eroding the ground from underneath us, knitting the halls and walls, old veins carrying new blood, room bent to room here in the darkness in which every inch could fill bright in an instant with the light of who had been, a bump in the brain raised over every hour rising from the night a ream of bodies once rubbed against or prayed against or raised in the light by the body here who cannot breathe, he who must move and move again through the black space after anything unlike what he already himself is, a room, a surface where he could lie down and breathe and exit and sleep inside a hull at least for hours free only again later rising to move into the room and find the bodies like his there in the photographs unending taken by who taken by who formed like him in countless mass in every room past the long halls there all awaiting his arrival with the eyes inside the mask, the rising of the blade again the burst of their blood again already unremembered from where they’d always waited and always hid protected from the night but not enough to not live here in the space where he is aging constantly shifted by the need to move and need to need, the black walls smeared with sun behind them where the sun itself ejects no light, no field forever turning over to show among its mud no inch of bone but braised gray shit.

Throughout November we will be publishing an anthology of short stories from our favourite authors to celebrate #NaNoWriMo. Follow them all at http://www.dazeddigital.com/nanowrimo and share your stories with us by tweeting @DazedMagazine with the hashtag #NaNoWriMo.